You are spot on with everything you said, Rand. It is possible but it will take a bit of time to rank if you're not proactively trying to acquire links. I have worked for a few sites that are great examples. OOne was a gaming site that pulled in 60,000+ organic search visits per day during the PlayStation Portable (PSP) era. We had a batallion of writers but no link building investments whatsoever. Every link we had was editorially earned. We reached PageRank 5 even before we started doing SEO.

Other sites were from Fortune 500 enterprises. We also did zero link building. All our SEO was done with technical optimization, content development and content promotion using traditional means sucj as press release distribution, interviews, industry analyst reports, etc. These sites ranked for very competitive keyword groups. Some keywwords were acronyms and we'd still be in the top five.

Of course, you can make the case that wih some ethical link building, we could be doing even better. That's beside the point. The fact of the matter is that our rankings ar stable, our organic traffic gradually grows and everything is looking sustainable.

Excellent post. I afree with practically everything i here. Just two points:

1. will it really help to have a McAfee badge? I can see how it woild help humans trust ytour site more, but Google seems perfectly capable of detecting malware on its own.

2. Putting my journalist hat on, I can see why Google wouldn't want PR sites dominating its SERPs. These sites are purveyors of content that's not necessarily their own, so the originality isn't all there. Also, press releases are by nature biased towards the organizations that send them out, so they should naturally score low on trust.